The Internet is hazardously insecure, as evidenced by repeated Internet outages and high-profile attacks. A particularly stubborn problem is securing routing between the tens of thousands of organizational networks, called Autonomous Systems (ASes), which make up the Internet (e.g. Google, Facebook, Bank of America, AT&T). The insecurity of Internet's routing system, namely, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is the glue that holds the Internet together, is constantly exploited to steal, monitor, and tamper with data traffic. This is, arguably, the Internet's biggest security hole, and constitutes a major threat to national security, financial bodies, and user privacy. Every year several high-profile attacks on the Internet routing system make the news while thousands of others go under the radar. However, despite over a decade of intensive efforts, routing security remains a distant dream.
To remedy BGP’s many security vulnerabilities, researchers and practitioners have invested much effort into designing security solutions for BGP routing. Yet, despite over a decade of Herculean efforts, many technological, political, and economic hurdles hinder, and possibly even prevent, deployment. I argue that the reasons for this are deeply rooted in today’s centralized, top-down, hierarchical paradigm for securing Internet routing. The aim of the planned research project is to put forth and explore a radically new paradigm for securing routing on the Internet. The proposed alternative roadmap for securing the Internet consists of two steps:
1) Jumpstarting BGP security: Devising a novel approach to routing security that bypasses the obstacles facing today’s agenda for securing the Internet. Specifically, the proposed design will be flat, decentralized, fully automated, avoid dependency on a single root-of-trust, and not require modifying/replacing legacy BGP routers.
2) A long-term vision for Internet routing: Leveraging the vast computational resources in modern datacenters, and research on Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), to outsource routing to a small number of entities while retaining flexibility, autonomy and privacy.
The ERC-funded research was also intended to explore whether the solutions devised for the BGP context are also relevant to other network security contexts, such as time synchronization on the Internet.
